Increasing amount of video and audio data calls for technologies for retrieving and managing the data efficiently. One of these technologies is a multimedia indexing technique for abstracting indexing information representing multimedia data to be used for data retrieval and searching.
Currently, with respect to a still picture, color histograms, shape descriptors and/or texture descriptors are used to abstract indexing information representing multimedia data, and for audio data, spectrum descriptors are used. With respect to a motion picture, motion information descriptors using motion vectors and/or orbit descriptors of objects are used. However, the descriptors of the conventional technologies are not those descriptors used to dynamically index shape information of objects within a video.
In addition, as one dynamic. indexing method for indexing the dynamic change of shape data, there is a method indexing the shape information of an object from the entire still pictures that compose a motion picture or from some representative still pictures by using the conventional still picture shape information indexing method. However, this method has a shortcoming that the data storing and retrieving efficiency is poor, because the amount of indexing information is increased, as the number of still pictures used for abstracting shape data is increased.